As a guest in a private house one incurs additional fatigue, but this is more than compensated for by the pleasure of meeting and learning to know your fellow-men and women. Is there a little desire for incense in all this? It may be, but there is also a genuine liking for one’s kind. To get a peep into the lives and thoughts of others can hardly fail to be interesting. Your material comforts are also much better attended to in the nest of the average clubwoman than in the leading hotel of the small town. The former gives you the best she has; she does everything in her power to make you comfortable under her roof. The chief danger is that of killing you with kindness by putting you on exhibition through unduly long hours. To be considered as a being apart is flattering, even though fatiguing. That you are like other women, capable of physical weariness, does not always occur to your kind entertainers. To find that you are to be the chief guest at a large luncheon given in your honor, just preceding your address, is disturbing. At such moments I sympathize with Mrs. Deland’s desire for the barbaric solitude of the hotel bedroom. Again, at the end of an hour, when you’ve done your best to entertain the audience, you would almost prefer not to shake hands with a couple of hundred persons. Still, it is a pleasure to meet your audience and to hear them say the lecture interested them. You look as animated as you can and try to vary the expression of your voice when you say for the hundredth time, “I’m glad you liked it.” For you are genuinely glad—of that there is no doubt. I learned ultimately to ask for a time of absolute quiet before speaking. This is more difficult to procure than the uninitiated suppose. It is a maxim with the average clubwoman that the “talent” must be on hand in very good season. Some clubs who are very secret about their affairs put you in a remote waiting-room which may or may not be warm. Others, remembering that you also are a clubwoman and likely to sympathize in their doings, give you a comfortable chair on the platform. As I am thoroughly in sympathy with the club idea and spirit, I like to hear the reports, provided they are not too long. At one enthusiastic club I sat during an hour or more while they thoroughly and conscientiously amended their constitution. For these reasons the lecturer sometimes weakly desires to delay her coming. She has a subconscious feeling that the program proper cannot begin until she gets there, and that therefore she could take a later train. This proves to be impossible, because of the necessity of personally meeting and guiding the “talent” (who might have the wandering tendencies characteristic of genius) to the right hall. The escort, being herself a member of the club, cannot, without sin, lose any crumb of the afternoon’s performance.